By this stage, you should have a decent base for SEO success. But this is only the beginning. SEO is an ongoing process that’s broadly divided into four facets:
Weve published beginners guides about each of these facets and so we wont cover every nook and cranny here. Instead, well focus on the basics and take a high-level view to help you understand why each facet is so important and how everything fits together.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the process of finding what your customers are searching for, how much traffic those terms can send your way, and how difficult it might be to rank for them. Lets explore the basics of each of those steps.
Find keywords
Understanding what kinds of things your potential customers are searching for is the first step of the keyword research process. Unless you know this, theres no way you can even begin to create pages that will rank in search engines and attract valuable traffic.
Brainstorming words and phrases that define your industry is the best way to start this process. For an online computer store, these might be things like:
You can then use these as "seed" keywords to find more ideas. Just plug them into a keyword research tool like Connekt Teacher Keywords Explorer and check one of the keyword ideas reports.
Look for keyword ideas that would be valuable for your business.
Check traffic potential
Pretty much every keyword research tool will show estimated monthly search volumes for the keywords it finds, including Connekt Teacher Keywords Explorer.
Search volume is usually a reasonable way to estimate the relative traffic potential of keywords. Generally speaking, pages targeting high-volume keywords will usually drive more traffic to your website than pages targeting low-volume keywords.
But keyword search volume isnt foolproof. There are instances where ranking #1 for a keyword with 1,000 monthly searches will drive more traffic than ranking #1 for a keyword with 2,000 monthly searches.
For example, “submit website to search engines†vs. “seo tips.â€
Even though the former has a higher search volume, the latters top-ranking page gets more organic traffic.
So its always worth looking at estimated organic traffic to the top-ranking page to get a better sense of a keywords traffic potential. You can do this in Keywords Explorer.
Check ranking difficulty
Even if a keyword seems relevant to your business and has high traffic potential, it wont always be easy to rank for.
Many things factor into the ranking difficulty of a keyword, but the number of relevant, prominent websites linking to the top-ranking pages is arguably the most important. Google talks about this in their guide to how search works: